Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain (50 page)

This idea that theatre and paintings were in some way interchangeable was perhaps reinforced in the 1880s when the managers of the Haymarket Theatre produced a new design for the proscenium arch, ‘set all around in an immense gilded frame, like that of some magnificent picture’, wrote Henry James, understanding immediately its function.
⁷⁹
From the early part of the century, stage designers had used painterly elements specifically to be recognized as restatements of themes and images found in old-master paintings. Equally, contemporary artists incorporated elements from stage design into their own work. John Martin’s wild imaginings of chaos could perhaps not have been painted without his having seen many scenes of stage destruction, and his paintings in turn fed back into stage design. In 1834
Sardanapalus
, based on Byron’s poem of a dramatic revolt against the Assyrian king Sardanapalus, was presented at Drury Lane, and the
Athenaeum
commended it highly - especially the last scene, when the vanquished king and his favourite slave immolated themselves on a blazing funeral pyre: ‘The burning itself, and the disappearance of
Sardanapalus
and
Myrrha
were capitally managed, and drew shouts of applause…We believe we need not inform our readers, that the last scene is a copy by Mr Stanfield, from Mr Martin’s picture, “The Fall of Nineveh”.’
⁸⁰

In 1853 Charles Kean also produced a version of
Sardanapalus
, and now the threads of influences were so tightly interwoven that it is difficult to see where each began and ended. A. H. Layard had encouraged the British government to purchase the ‘winged bulls’ from his Assyrian excavations, and in 1847 they arrived to be displayed at the British Museum to great fanfare, the
Illustrated London News
having recorded their journey as they made their way to Britain. There was also Layard’s own book,
Nineveh and its Remains
, with the winged bulls as a frontispiece, which appeared the following year; by 1851 it had been abridged as a popular railway-library book. The possibilities for paying entertainment did not end there: there was a panorama of Nimrud and a diorama of Nineveh, complete with a simultaneous lecture by the artist, who had been at the excavations with Layard. So by the time Kean began work
on his production the public was familiar with the accepted view of what Assyrian art looked like. Kean thought that
Sardanapalus
could not have been produced successfully earlier, because ‘until now we have known nothing of Assyrian architecture and costume’.
⁸¹
For him, and for many of his audience, the ‘reality’ of pictorial imagery was a mark of the success or failure of serious drama. Not everyone agreed. The essayist G. H. Lewes heavily criticized Kean’s production, and by extension the growing reliance on stage effects more generally: ‘Is the Drama nothing more than a Magic Lantern on a large scale? Was Byron only a pretext for a panorama? It is a strange state of Art when the mere
accessories
become the aim and purpose of representation - when truth of archaeology supplants truth of human passion - when “winged bulls” dwarf heroic natures!’
⁸²

Yet when it came to Shakespeare Lewes felt exactly the opposite: ‘We must have some accessory attraction to replace that literary and historical interest which originally made Shakespeare’s historical plays acceptable…Scenery, dresses, groupings, archaeological research, and pictorial splendour, can replace for moderns the poetic and historic interest which our forefathers felt in these plays.’ Many in the theatre felt the same. By 1873, in a production of
Antony and Cleopatra
, half the text was cut - twenty-eight complete scenes vanished, as well as chunks of dialogue from the remaining text. This was to make way for a scene in which Cleopatra’s entire barge was brought onstage, while perfume was wafted across the audience ‘by means of Rimmel’s Persian Ribbon’.
*
There was also the insertion of a Grand Roman Festival with ‘a Path of Flowers’, ballets, songs, and processions for Venus, Juno, Diana and Flora.
⁸³
Charles Calvert at the Princess’ Theatre, Manchester, travelled to Venice to bring back a gondola to copy for
The Merchant of Venice
in 1871; in 1872 he interpolated a scene into
Henry V
so that the king could return in triumph to London:

Those who saw the scene will not have forgotten the crowds of citizens, artizans, youths, maidens and nobles of the land who filled the streets and temporary balconies hung with tapestries…One remembers the distant hum of voices, and how the volume of sound swelled as the little army approached on its
march from Blackheath; how the sound burst into a mighty shout as the hero of Agincourt rode through the triumphal archway…Showers of gold dust fell from the turrets, red roses of Lancaster covered the rude pavements, the bells clashed out, and a great thanksgiving went up to heaven for the preservation of the gallant King and his little army of heroes. The curtain descended on a perfect picture of mediaeval England.
⁸⁴

These crowd scenes were popular - as popular as the variations on Shakespeare that the illegitimate theatre had been producing from the early part of the century. In the eighteenth century Garrick had promoted Shakespeare tirelessly; in 1740 Shakespeare had made up only 25 per cent of London theatre productions; under Garrick at Drury Lane alone, 25 per cent of all tragedies and 16 per cent of all comedies were Shakespeare.
⁸⁵
In 1809 the patent theatres lost their monopoly on Shakespeare, unofficially if not officially, when the Surrey Theatre came up with a way of doing Shakespeare while staying on the right side of the Licensing Act. It advertised ‘a Grand Ballet of Action, with recitative, founded on Macbeth’ - a musical version, with whatever dialogue was necessary communicated by banners and scrolls, while a chorus of sprites sang Macbeth’s thoughts to the audience. For example:

Is this a dagger which I see before me?
My brains are scatter’d in whirlwind stormy.

Similar productions quickly followed. The Coburg produced a version of
The Merchant of Venice
entitled
The Three Caskets
, a ‘New Tragic Comic Melo-Drama’, as well as a
Hamlet, Prince of Denmark
that was based on a French neoclassical rewriting, complete with serio-pantomime in the French style and Gothic scenes of the ‘Cemetery of the Kings of Denmark, by Moonlight’ and the ‘Royal Museum, with the Sarcophaguses and Urn of the Late King’. At the Surrey, Hamlet was put on trial for his father’s murder, and the attempted murder of his mother, and was saved at the last moment by Gertrude’s confession, whereupon he was proclaimed king.
⁸⁶

By the end of the 1820s the Pavilion Theatre, in Whitechapel, was staging more Shakespeare than Covent Garden and Drury Lane combined, including productions (always in song or dumbshow, it must be remembered) of
Richard III
,
Macbeth
,
Othello
,
Hamlet
,
Cymbeline
,
Henry IV
,
Romeo and Juliet
,
The Merchant of Venice
and
Coriolanus.
⁸⁷
A good
indication of how well known these plays had become was the sudden eruption of burlesques on Shakespeare. The first appeared in 1810:
Hamlet Travestie
by John Poole, which was staged at the Regency Theatre. Its success on stage can be measured today by the fact that it went through at least six printed editions before 1817. In 1813 it was staged at Covent Garden itself, making the circle complete: now the legitimate theatre was relying on the illegitimate theatre for nourishment. These burlesques grew ever more numerous by mid-century. Most relied for their comedy on inserted business - Juliet’s dog barking throughout the balcony scene, or
Hamlet
’s graveyard scene sung to the tune of the popular song ‘Dorothy Dumps’ - or they reset the drama in contemporary situations - Othello as a street-sweeper. There were also topical allusions, political satire, interpolated songs, references to prizefighters or magic shows or legitimate productions of the plays, or even just out-and-out silliness - when Hamlet tries to embrace his father in
Hamlet according to an Act of Parliament
(1853) he is rejected by the ghost, who says, ‘Spectres ain’t allowed to cuddle.’ Yet many of the jokes showed that the audiences possessed a formidable range of theatrical references. In
Masaniello; or, The Fish o’Man of Naples
[
sic
] at the Olympic in 1857, the lead opened with:

My Lord, the Earl of Hammersmith is taken!
Stop! That’s in
Hamlet.
I’m Masaniello!
To be or not to be was - that’s in
Othello
,
Translated into Irish - for Ristori.
Pop goes the Weasel - that’s from
Trovatore
!
*
⁸⁸

Planché had been expecting his audience to be well versed in Shakespeare for years, and he was adept at mingling Shakespearean references with the contemporary and the commercial in his extravaganzas. In
The Good Woman in the Wood
, King Bruin mixed Hamlet and shopping:

Though yet of our late brother, who has been
So long defunct, the memory’s so green
That we have subjects who dare still look blue
When that grave subject is alluded to;
This is to give you all a gentle hint
Not to presume at acts of ours to squint
Through spectacles of any hue but those
Made by our order of ‘Couleur de Rose’,
And sold, to suit all ages and conditions,
By Wink and Company, the Court opticians…
But now, our cousin Sylvan, and step-son.

PRINCE (
aside
): A little more than
cozened
, I am done Unutterably brown, if all be true…

And the references went beyond theatre. At the Olympic, in Francis Talfourd’s
Atalanta, or, The Three Golden Apples
, an extravaganza staged in 1857, King Schoeneus of Scyros appeared in a chariot loaded down with a picnic basket which was labelled ‘FOPTNYM AND LAROM’.
⁸⁹
In
The Sleeping Beauty
, Planché had Beauty comment on ‘The lock upon the door at the first landing, / The only Locke upon my understanding.’
⁹⁰
It is hard to imagine today straight theatre, much less pantomime, expecting its audiences to read Greek characters, or appreciate jokes about political philosophers.

While some audiences enjoyed these knowing winks and nods, others wanted more visceral amusement. The Coburg managed to win over working-class audiences with blood and guts - this was in the period when the theatre was nicknamed the Blood Tub or the Bleedin’ Vic for its fondness for staging melodramas
*
- while it reassured its middle-class customers that all was done in the name of historical accuracy. Milner’s
Lucius Catiline, the Roman Traitor
(1827) was advertised as ‘a faithful picture of the Manners, Warfare, Religious and Civil Ceremonies, &c., of the Ancient Romans’. This followed the line Thomas Dibdin had taken when he ran the Royal Circus after 1819, staging versions of
The Bride of Lammermoor; or, The Spectre at the Fountain
and
Ivanhoe; or, The Jew’s Daughter
which amused the lower classes with strong melodramatic elements, and reassured the more serious by being adaptations of Sir Walter Scott.
⁹¹

As well as an assurance of taste, an adaptation, a well-known plot, also gave the audience a head start in the huge theatres where audibility
was often a problem. Really popular works were adapted over and over, and the characters of novels and poems achieved afterlives their authors could never have imagined: Byron’s
The Corsair
was adapted for the stage, and was then followed by a new theatrical ‘family’ with
The Corsair’s Bride
and
The Corsair’s Son.
⁹²
Within a single month of publication of Dickens’s Christmas story ‘The Cricket on the Hearth’, seventeen adaptations had been staged. Earlier, Moncrieff, who had adapted
Life in London
, was one of many who produced a version of Mary Shelley’s Gothic novel
Frankenstein.
The first version of this amazingly popular story appeared in Birmingham in 1824 as
Presumption
;
or, The Fate of Frankenstein
, and it was helped along by a vociferous campaign mounted by those shocked at the immoral life of the novel’s author. The Coburg produced
Frankenstein; or, The Demon of Switzerland
in the same year, and managed to fill its nearly 4,000 seats every night. Other versions reset the novel in Venice, or Sicily; some gave the characters ‘comic’ foreign names such as Ratzbaen or Tiddliwincz.
⁹³
*
There were pantomime
Frankenstein
s, and musical ones; there were burlesques, there were parodies, and there were straightforward melodramas.

It was melodrama that was best suited to the dramatic stage effects that had been in vogue since de Loutherbourg. Melodrama had been developing over the century, from the Gothic effusions of the eighteenth century, through military dramas like
Mazeppa
, to plays that explored the social world of their own audiences. Jerrold’s
The Rent Day
, which was superficially about a rural world of oppressed peasants and wicked squires that few of his audience now knew at first hand, was in reality very close to home: it was about being turned out of one’s home for lack of money to pay the rent. After its success, a series of factory- or workrelated plays followed, with titles like
The Factory Strike; or, Want, Crime, and Retribution
(1838), and
Mary of Manchester; or, The Spirit of the Loom
(1847), and
The Foreman of the Works
(1886).
⁹⁴
And melodrama appealed to more than a taste for stories of good triumphing over evil: its reliance on spectacle was a great selling point. In its early days in the illegitimate theatres, spectacle had been necessary owing to the ban on dialogue. Later, in the mega-theatres, the visual could make clear what was lost through inaudibility. The manager of Astley’s in the 1860s testified to a
parliamentary select committee, ‘For a person to bring out a merely talking drama, without any action in it, or sensational effects, is useless; the people will not go to that theatre; they will go where there is scenic effect, and mechanical effects to please the eye.’ This had nothing to do with class any more. The
Theatre
, an upmarket arts journal, in 1882 thought that